The Silver Searcher

The Silver Searcher (ag) is a code searching tool similar to ack but faster, created by Geoff Greer (ggreer) in 2011. With over 26,000 stars as of 2026, ag was designed to be significantly faster than ack by using parallel directory traversal and efficient file reading, while respecting .gitignore and .hgignore rules to skip unnecessary files. Written in C for maximum performance, ag can search through large codebases (millions of lines) in fractions of a second. Key features include: blazing fast search using pthreads for parallel file scanning and PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) for pattern matching, automatic .gitignore and .hgignore compliance (skipping files ignored by version control, dramatically reducing the search space), .agignore support for custom ignore patterns, file type filtering (--python, --javascript, etc., based on file extensions and content heuristics), search result context (showing lines before and after matches with -A, -B, -C flags), colorized output with file name, line number, and matched text highlighting, case-insensitive search (-i), word search (-w for whole-word matching), inverted search (-v for lines NOT matching), count-only mode (-c), file listing mode (-l for just file names with matches), search across multiple file types simultaneously, custom search paths, and editor integration (Vim, Emacs, Sublime Text, VS Code, Atom). The Silver Searcher was eventually superseded by ripgrep in performance and features, but remains widely installed.